"4mg during the week and 5mg at the weekend. Party time!"A smile, a chuckle and then back to sooking the lemon pan drops.
Buddhist Pizza :- Accept no Cuts or Substitutesyou will know I have succumbed to irrational exuberance.
Avoid hasty actions or taking the bait - this will require nerve, discretion and discipline.and when waiting around in police vans:
If drinking coffee or reading the paper when embussed (sic), please be discrete (sic).Oh lordy, lordy Friday already an we hent paid the rent.
As the end of the financial year draws nigh at Buddhist Pizza Inc. we have considered various salaries, payments, emoluments, bonuses and other matters of remuneration. The year has not been without its challenges and the modest profit of 4 trillion dollars has only been achieved through the tried and tested methods that have stood the financial services industry in such good stead for many years. Through the good offices and endeavours of our accountants, Messrs Bent, Filchit, Haven and Transfer-Pricing, we will pay tax of some 2,000 dollars to the government of the Cayenne Islands, where we are incorporated and have our magnificent headquarters alongside Fast Willy’s Chicken Diner. It is only fitting that we accept our corporate social responsibility and contribute to the economy of the Cayenne Islands. As a gesture of good will over and above this we will pay for a re-spray on Fast Willy’s van, in our corporate colours of course. Waste receptacles will also be provided to assist with the conservation of the environment and to reduce expenditure on rat poison. We expect, after dividend, professional services and other unavoidable costs, to be able to distribute 3.999 trillion dollars to board members and senior staff.
However, the way ahead is not without its dangers. My friends in the City of London have alerted me to moves by the great unwashed to force dynamic entrepreneurs, myself included, to pay more tax! I have created the magnificent wealth generating behemoth Buddhist Pizza Inc. as a contribution to humanity. It is my life’s work, it is my contribution to society. I have gained so little and given so much! What do they want now, blood? Oh no they want to:-
Pursue transparency,
Prioritise the needs of developing countries,
Abolish the City of London Corporation,
Reform onshore taxation,
Tackle the intermediaries and private users of offshore vehicles,
Reform the financial sector.
My god!
(see Treasure Islands – Tax havens and the men who stole the world. Nicholas Shaxson)
There are men like John Christensen biting the hand that is trying to take food from your table. I must confess that I had to sit down with a very stiff drink (40 year old Glen Trust – 2,000 sovs. a bottle) when I saw the anti-wealth pornography at Mr Murphy’s site.
I couldn’t finish watching it all. I had to finish the bottle instead.
So I say to Mr Cameron:- Stand firm rubber man!
And to Gideon:- Don’t be lily livered, live up to your name; cut, cut and cut again!
St Vincent De Cable remember:- the poor will always be with us, who else are we going to tax?
It now emerges, thanks to a genuine old-fashioned scoop in Le Monde, that President Ben Ali didn't really intend to flee his country at all. He planned to fly his immediate family to safety in Riyadh and then return to Tunis next morning to continue his reign. Only when the Tunisair crew arrived in Saudi Arabia and saw al-Jazeera in the airport's VIP lounge, announcing Ben Ali's overthrow, did they call Tunis and receive a new flight plan to take off at 1.30am the following day. They discreetly flew away while the President slept, leaving the dictator planeless in Riyadh.Worthy of Boot of the Beast.
Yes I know, terrible isn't it? I blame the last government!Come on Dave. We want a society that is big enough to cherish and nurture all its children as a priority!
the substitution of a word referring to an attribute for the thing that is meant, as for example the use of the crown to refer to a monarchHowever, I was instructed at the end of this definition to - compare synecdoche!
a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for a whole or a whole for a part, as in 50 head of cattle for 50 cows, or the army for a soldierand be back at the rashers and eggs in no time, washing it down with lashings of tea I’m sure, but I am destroyed. The little worm is there; the tautological quantum elusiveness of the smile on Schrödinger’s Cat:- a part is substituted for a whole or a whole for a part
Cervantes worked as a purveyor for the Spanish Armada, and later as a tax collector. In 1597, discrepancies in his accounts of three years previous landed him in the Crown Jail of Seville.So there I am with this picture in my head. Poor old Cervantes up against some hatchet faced cleric with a pencil moustache and goatee beard, his Gracious Majesty’s Auditor General.
So Miguelito, you say the Santa Pinyada sank with all hands and a fortune in gold bullion in the Irish Sea?
Yee.ss.
Just outside a port known by the heretic English as Liverpool, such disgusting names?
Yee.ss.
Then can you explain to me how a ship, a ship looking remarkably like the Santa Pinyada, was seen in a dry dock in this Liverpool having its name repainted as the New Brighton Ferry?
Can you further explain why a claim has been made by you on the insurance for the Santa Pinyada, loss with all hands and gold bullion, on the Armada No 1 Policy, at the Holy Catholic Insurance Society in Sevilla, (In God we trust and for the rest HCIS)? No, no explanation? Well I can only say how disappointed I am, deeply disappointed, and you do not want to disappoint the Spanish Audition!
Act casual, act vegetarian!I will be pulling the leg of my vegetarian friends and relations for some time about that.
Some hae books and canna read,
And some wad read that want it;
But we hae books, and we can read,
Sae let the books be thankit
This Teashop will be closed for business until further notice.
We are very grateful to all those we have helped along the way.
Please help yourselves to a few spuds from the sack below.
Me Ma said that they are the best she has ever grown!
Brian (without the other Brian this time) xxx
Time takes its dreadful toll on us all.
We panic at the flickering of a dim light.
At the going down of the sun
We fear we may not be there to remember.
Unspoken the fear that we will be there but not remember.
Life, a fragile web of chemistry,
Forms the human to make what it can.
Self, family, friends; stations on the impermanent way.
Fortunes good, bad, and those made by our endeavours.
Our name and our future shining bright behind us.
Born into slaughter, growing in hard times,
You carried life and gave it four forms.
Tumult passed you by as did the voices of those you loved.
You nurtured your family, your friends, your garden
and the birds that pleased/vexed you silently.
These are your name and your future.
Two generations loved and blessed, no harsh words for any,
But every hedge clipped to within an inch of its life.
Your own words, your tribute,
Good and Gracious!
One of the sharpest criticisms of Thatcherism in popular culture in the eighties was, in my view, Arthur Daley's hapless, seedy entrepreneur. I was reminded of this when our own becondommed leader offered us flu vaccine from previous years.
So there you are in some drinking dive in Westminster. Smoothie chops Dave, camel hair coat, ridiculous titfer, cigar in one hand and V&T in the other is holding forth. He leans across the bar to Andrew, a dour silvertop who is polishing bedpans.
“So Andy, we are running out of the old flu vaccine.
It just so happens I know this guy in Catford who has a warehouse full of the stuff.
This is the real McCoy. It would bring down a herd of swans at 50 paces. Lamentable, because it is a tad past its sell by date it is languishing in a crummy lockup!
Andy holds a bedpan up to the light squints at it. With all the enthusiasm of man about to cut off his own right arm with a rusty butter knife he lets out a slow stream of breath followed by,
“I suppose we could give it a try, it would have to be dated 2000 an somefink though Dave, no tricks mind!”
Arthur looks mortified, as if someone had accused him of a VAT fiddle. He replies,
“Andy, how long have you known me? Would I seek to abuse the bonds of friendship, pollute the trust of two trading partners with some cheap legerdemain? “
He turns to a sallow yoof at his side and rouses him from a reverie of heaven knows what with,
“Gideon, get the motor, pop round to Stavros at Biggie Pharma and pick up a few cases of Chateau Avian 2009! Try not to drop it. “
Arthur smiles, empties his glass, points it in the direction of the vodka optic and requests,
“A large one, please Andy, not too much ice!”
Pretty devious stuff this DNA, my guess is that it is taking over the world!If you want to know the mechanism for the central dogma behind this assertion the video in the following link may give you a clue, or it may not, anyway pure Star Wars.
It's official, I'm dead, please address all future communications to Elizabeth.Very droll but I'm not sure I would want to tempt fate!
In search of some support from the past, I found this passage in the preface to Tom Jones. "An author ought to consider himself," wrote Henry Fielding, "not as a gentleman who gives a private treat, but rather as one who keeps a pub, at which all persons are welcome for their money."That's it then.
I would put good money (50p each way) on Tony, the whinging misery guts, popping his clogs in some fashion on Sunday.There now, I apologise to the host of our regular readers, yes you two at the back, who do not know what I am bleating on about.
Much of left thinking has been based on denial: don't eat this, believe that or behave like the other. Slow Food provides a healthy antidote of inclusion, rather than exclusion...It got me thinking.
Slow Food raises a lot of questions about what a social movement actually is. It undoubtedly has had a wider impact in Italy, where it has spun off a number of other slow movements (Slow Cities, Slow Money). But also beyond, there are now tens of thousands of adherents all around the globe, who identify with an analysis that merges issues of quality with those of justice and sustainability. The movement is, by and large, entrepreneurial, championing smallholders' rights to produce and sell their goods to eco-conscious consumers, in a market setting not dominated by corporate agriculture. This separates Slow Food from the conventional left. So does its enthusiastic embrace of the pleasure principle.
Of course, the old left is not about to disappear completely. It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker. Stunningly, the paper is still being peddled at every demonstration to young cyber-activists for whom the very concept of a newspaper is almost as outdated as the notion of ideological unity as a basis for action.Now if you can turn that very elegant phrase into a programme of action and create a set of tools for progress and conviviality you will really do something. But don't forget the conviviality, in my view it is what defines us as truly human!
We speak in hundreds of thousands of voices – voices that are being raised across Europe, not in unison but in harmony.
George Osborne has a capacity to get up one's nose, doesn't he?Gideon "Chicken Scratch" Osborne?
for the university to pay UCL cleaners the London living wage, to bring outsourced support staff in-house and to change the composition of the university council to get rid of the majority of corporate non-UCL members (they'd like a quarter each of management, students, tutors and support staff)It is good to see some thought, humour and non violence in demonstrations for change. (I have to admit that I get no joy from seeing buildings trashed or people pulled from wheelchairs, the dinosaurs on both sides do themselves no favours by such.) It is interesting to see the use of technology and the internet to co-ordinate, organise and disseminate. Does it make the protest more effective? It certainly captures transgressions and makes them available for all to see. We may not know who you are, we may not know where you live but we know the cowardly, vicious and violent things that you do and so does everyone else.
'Why is it so surprising that the police dragged me from my wheelchair?'I suppose it is a mercy that he is not Brazilian or a vendor of newspapers.
It is very easy in this superheated, febrile, atmosphere with accusations of treason and treachery bandied about like snuff at a wake to miss that which we have always known.
Deep in the bowels of the Buddhist Pizza Manorial Home there is a small coterie of anarchists, trouble makers, Wikileakers and no good boyos. Lady BP feeds them caviar, mushy peas, and black pudding, washed down with tea, lashings of tea. They foment, they rail they call for the rebirth of Western civilization but, they pay their bills and there is no drink, women or noise after 10.00 pm. We have made provision, in the form of extensive server farms and other gizmology about the estate, to counter any denial of service. They have been subjected to vicious and vitriolic attacks. They have been accused of crimes, misdemeanours, perversions and failures of moral character that would curdle concrete and this by thrupenny jobsworths of low breeding, no hair and a very noticeable lack personal hygiene. I issue a call to support them. The very foundation of free speech is imperilled. If we do not take a stand now we risk all that we hold dear, our homes, our families, our jobs, our pensions, our mortgages, our savings and very possibly our first born! (to be continued ....)
Best wishes from Fianna Fail.There that should do it!
Brian and Brian XXX.
A young girl from the favela carries an unexpected burden on a cross-city journey.Sadly, it's not on the iPlayer but that would only give you a week or so. By then I'm sure the Coalition Forces will have taken over Bush House. There will be grey uniformed militia under the direction of Gauleiter Pickles stamping their jackboots down on the iPlayer. For you Tommy the music has stopped. Now find a place to sit down; but not in inner London! (Didn't we have a run in with Lady Tesco about that before?)
The respected IFS think-tank says poorer families with children would be the "biggest losers".I believe I heard the word regressive connected to the word taxation, anarchy!
Very unsure of both himself and God's command, he requested proof of God's will by two miracles, performed on consecutive nights and the exact opposite of each other:Amen, comrades, amen! So think on. This afternoon, if you are in the squeezed middle or just plain dirt poor, the destroyer, the tree feller is coming to get you, your job, your house, your pension if you have one, your hospital, your benefits and probably your first born.
The heart of the innovation process has to do with prospecting, mining, refining, and goldsmithing. Knowing how and where to look and recognizing gold when you find it is just the start. The path from staking a claim to piling up gold bars is a long and arduous one. It is one few are equipped to follow, especially if they actually believe they have struck it rich when the claim is staked. Yet the true value is not realized until after the skilled goldsmith has crafted those bars into something worth much more than its weight in gold. In the meantime, our collective glorification of and fascination with so-called invention—coupled with a lack of focus on the processes of prospecting, mining, refining, and adding value to ideas—says to me that the message is simply not having an effect on how we approach things in our academies, governments, or businesses.To cut a long nose short. His contention is that, even in the fast changing world of computers where it is almost impossible to keep up, the span from light bulb moment to the quotidian can be a nose spanning tens of years. So the major whizbangs passing into common as muck/cheap as chips category in the next ten years will be based on technology that is ten years old?
Ham inspectors put 17 tonnes of pig meat into quarantine yesterday as they cracked down on what they suspected was a massive fraud involving Spanish hams that – purportedly – come from the haunches of free-range pigs that feast daily on acorns.By their arithmetic ye shall know them.
Authorities in southern Andalucia said that, to provide the quantity of ibérico hams that now hang from supermarket meat counters, the region would need to double the number of locally bred, acorn-fed pigs…By the way if you have not seen Jamon, Jamon by Bigas Luna get yourself a plate of pata negra, some fresh pan, a bottle of fino and be prepared for fun.
Capitals do have their uses, of course. As the Urban Dictionary puts it: "Capitalisation is the difference between 'I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse' and 'I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.'"Capital, capital!
In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.Certainly there is a role for the new tools and the new ways of working. Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody”, is a very good exposition of that. They are not the panacea for all our ills, and I would accept that I am susceptible to panaceaitis, maybe more that the next person. Where I might differ from Gladwell is that he believes:-
…if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.You have to be well organised and have your members committed but we all know the dangers of hierarchies from churches to political parties.
The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.”He finishes the article with:-
The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.However, consider in turn that if you want to read the truth, write it on a wall. If you want to be free, pull the wall down. But make sure it is not a structural member, it is not of historical or architectural interest, you have planning permission to demolish, you have carried out a risk assessment for the demolition, you have consulted widely on this and genuinely believe that a majority of the relevant population are in favour, that the minority who have fears about the demolition have been reassured, and that it has zero carbon impact and that David and Gideon could find a slot in their very busy diaries if there was a suitable photo op. with the common people, there was provision for drinkie-poos afterwards, no press, and………..
I am the man, the very fat man, who waters the workers' beer.
I am the man, the jolly fat man, who waters the workers' beer.
What do I care if it makes them ill; if it makes them terrible queer!
I've a car, a yacht, an airoplane from watering workers' beer.
"For you Tommy the war is over. Have some beer, it is warm as you English like it; I leave you to guess why!"However, help is at hand, not for the films, mercifully they all sank without trace.
Much restored after a week here, battered by beauty and the wind (but not rain) we return with glorious colour worthy of a tropical sun, at least from the scarf up!
A report last month in the Economist tells us that "blogging is dying" as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: the tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.Have I played Sancho Panza too many times to Hidalgos on their Rocinantes?
Do a search-and-replace on "blog" and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.
Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.
... would love to have seen, the ultimate surrealism of watching the games projected live onto the “separation wall” in Bethlehem. Al-Jazeera and other media report the wall’s use as a huge screen draws massive and cheerful crowds from the city and its refugee camps. This is something really exciting: conflated resistance and cynicism are precariously interwoven in one big transcending act that allows the besieged Palestinians to set themselves virtually free and go global.When is a separation wall not a wall? When it is a window on the world!
Enry, viejo perro, como se saja? Madre de puta, estas bien?
Speek en Englesh pleese, for the tape!
Ho K Enry, whatever you say, conejotito!
The reason I drag you out of the Bilderbergs is I want to ask you a question.
Dit you put the pressure on the Espanish Supremes to have me fired so you can come to Sitges? There, I seddit.
